しあわせ

I was a little underwhelmed by Apple’s two recent offerings. The Touch didn’t get a camera and the price drop has yet to convince me to buy one. Maybe in the New Year.

Then there was Snow Leopard. Anything new and exciting here? Anything new for Japanese learners?

Not really. There’s a few new fonts (nothing too exciting) and there’s a port of the input method for Chinese from the Touch. That was enough to get me to buy a copy. It was cheap at any rate.

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Since MacOS X was first released the built-in support for Japanese has been excellent. Everything you need for Japanese is in the standard installation. It’s there when you want it. It just works; no searching around for install disks. I recently installed Windows XP using Parallels on my Mac. Boy it’s clunky. Mac is the way to go for Japanese. Doubly so because, if you want, with an Intel Mac you can get Windows too.

Japanese support was a big reason for me to go OS X several years ago. It was a deciding factor on Leopard as well.
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NoteBook 2.1 from Circus Ponies Software

I use my MacBook a lot to learn Japanese. I’ve got so many clippings from websites, stray urls, little notes I’ve written scattered all over my harddrive. I’ve also got loads of barely organised pieces of paper with notes. The solution? NoteBook!

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Skim 0.7

I came across this useful little program for the Mac today. It’s a pdf reader that allows you to add notes and marks to a pdf file.

I carry my laptop much more often than I carry my class notes. So what I do is scan in the handouts I get in class and annotate them so I have a ready reference without carrying large amounts of paper around. (It might be possible to OCR the handouts but I’ve never needed this step.) It’s also possible to make them searchable if you annotate them properly.

The drawbacks (or maybe it’s just a feature) are that the notes and marks are not part of the pdf so other readers won’t be able to display them. So if you want to share a marked up document the other person will need to use Skim as well. I’ve found that notes added in another program won’t open and as yet I’ve had no success with the line/arrow tool.

What I particulary like about this program is it’s layout of panes and the ability to set what font and size you want the notes in. I always found the fixed size in other programs too small to read kanji notes. Best of all it’s free

Not really to do with learning Japanese, but Go is part of Japanese culture. This is an absorbing game with rules simple enough to be grasped in 30 mins but with strategy complex enough to last a lifetime. It is also the only game I’ve come across with a handicapping system that can give an enjoyable and challenging game for both opponents when one is experienced and the other is a novice.

Goban is a mac implementation of GNU Go. It is very elegant and much more convenient sometimes that getting out the board and stones. You can play against the program, or use it to play against opponents locally, on the internet or on your LAN.
If you like chess or strategic games I’d recommend you give Go a try.

This is a small shareware program that allows you to make flashcard sets, organise them and run them on your Mac. It’s based around the concept of cards that have a question on one side and answer on the other that you use to quiz yourself on vocabulary. (Something that I don’t remember from school but it’s better than reading and trying to memorise whole lists.).

One of the advantages of a computer based system is you can have more than two sides to a card and can keep track of the ones you know more easily. You can print out your cards if you want and can also export them to an iPod. (But large text files don’t seem to work well on my first generation iPod and are very slow to load and scroll). Another good feature of iflash is that the author keeps a site where he encourages users to upload and download card sets and there are a number of good Japanese sets.

iFlash only costs $15 and I think it’s well worth it.